GUWAHATI, Feb 22 - The State government, under the World Bank-financed Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation Project (APART), is planning to modernise and upgrade 75 agricultural wholesale markets across the State to provide physical infrastructural facilities to agricultural trade.
In addition, through APART, the government also plans to set up a market intelligence cell (MIC) in the State to provide timely market-related information and intelligence to farmers and other agri value chain players.
With this aim in view, a two-day training of trainers programme was held here recently for officials of the Assam State Agricultural Marketing Board (ASAMB) and marketing inspectors of regulated market committees (RMCs) of the State.
The event was held with technical support from the National Institute of Agricultural Marketing (NIAM), Jaipur. A three-member team of experts from NIAM led by Dr Hema Yadav took part in it.
The trainees were trained on different aspects of good agricultural marketing practices (GAMPs) like aggregation, grading and standardisation of agricultural produce, regulatory aspects of agricultural marketing, contract farming, importance of electronic negotiable warehouse receipts (e-NWR) and effective linking of farmers to markets.
The trained master trainers (MTs) will now impart training on GAMPs to progressive farmers, traders and aggregators of their respective RMCs command areas in the districts.